Biotech and Life Sciences

Life Sciences Patent Specialists

Cantab IP is a Singapore-based patent firm specialising in biotech, pharmaceuticals and associated areas in the life sciences and healthcare.

Biotech Patent Attorney Based in Singapore

Our principal attorney, Dr Khoo Chong-Yee, has two decades of experience as a biotech patent attorney in the United Kingdom, Europe and Singapore. He is one of the few qualified biotech patent attorneys in Singapore and South East Asia.

He has extensive experience in patent drafting, prosecuting and defending patents worldwide in a broad range of biotech, pharma, life sciences and related subject matter. His clients include universities, research institutes, startups, SMEs and large industrial clients in Asia, Europe and the US.

Chong-Yee has postgraduate research experience with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in DNA replication and the cell cycle. He is an author on two Nature papers and one in Current Biology.

Before founding Cantab IP, he was a partner in the biotechnology and life sciences group at one of the leading patent and trade mark firms in the United Kingdom. He has industry experience, having worked in-house in the IP department of a large Danish diagnostics manufacturer.

Chong-Yee has acted for a number of household names in the fields of food sciences, vaccines, pharmaceuticals as well as some of the most prestigious universities and research institutes in the world.

He enjoys talking science with inventors, and is fortunate to have worked with a number of leading scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners.

Broad Range of Technical Fields

Although we can handle most types of subject matter in the life sciences, we have particular expertise in drafting patent applications in the following fields:

• diagnostics and personalised medicine
• drug screening
• oncology and cancer biology (breast cancer, liver cancer, etc)
• tumour therapy and CAR T-cell therapy
• drug delivery
• microarray technologies
• genes, proteins, nucleic acid and polypeptide sequences
• cell cycle, zinc fingers, GPCRs
• gene editing and CRISPR
• cell lines and cell culture
• embryonic stem cells (ES cells)
• developmental biology
• antibody technology
• vaccines
• tropical diseases (e.g., dengue, chikungunya)
• bioinformatics
• pharmaceuticals, including combination therapies
• food technology
• medical equipment
• medical technology (medtech)
• personalised medicine
• artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)

Our clients include local and foreign funding agencies, research institutes, academia, SMEs, biotech startups and large pharma in Singapore and elsewhere.

Patent Term Extensions

Singapore patent law allows for extensions of term for patent protection caused by delays in obtaining marketing approval for pharmaceutical products in Singapore. These are generally equivalent to Supplementary Protection Certificates (SPE) in Europe.

For more information, please see our article on patent term extensions in Singapore.

Other Services

Cantab IP also provides advice on the provisions relating to IP of the regulatory approval process under the Singapore Medicines Act. We are also able to advise on Plant Variety Rights and Supplementary Protection Certificates.